Stay on target

This weekend saw the 22nd EVO Championship event in Las Vegas. If you’re not familiar, it’s basically the Super Bowl for fighting game fans, drawing thousands of the best competitors from all over the globe to compete for fortune and glory. Winning EVO basically makes your reputation for life in the FGC, so it’s no surprise that all the killers were out to play.

In most years, the biggest tournament is for Street Fighter, and UK player Problem X beat a stacked field with his Bison and Abigail to come out on top for that game. But the most hype game of the event with the most entrants was, surprisingly, Dragon Ball FighterZ. Arc System Works’ 3-on-3 anime fighting game has all of the ingredients for popping crowds – flashy combos, dirty mixups, just the right amount of comeback potential and tense finishes. The finals of this year’s EVO saw Dominique “SonicFox” McLean pull it out against Japanese player Goichi “GO1” Kishida.

The fighting game community has a bunch of traditions, and one that’s pretty storied is the “popoff,” where when you win that big victory you jump out of your seat and make your feelings known, sometimes to your opponent’s face. But when SonicFox took home the trophy, his popoff was like nothing the FGC had ever seen before.

First, he put on his big blue fursuit fox head. Because SonicFox is a furry.

Geek culture – and gaming culture especially – has been getting a bad rap in recent years due to a fraction of bad actors who are rabidly pushing back against the progression of culture. The fighting game community has a reputation from the outside of being hyper-macho and confrontational, but as SonicFox and dozens of others are showing, that reputation isn’t really deserved anymore. A gay furry just won the most hype tournament of the show, to the wild adulation of hundreds of thousands of people watching. The FGC boasts gay people, straight people, trans men and women, from every country in the world. The only thing that matters is how you play.

And that’s what geek culture should value, because that’s how we all got started. We became geeks because we wanted to do something, and we wanted to do it as hard as we possibly could. Geek culture is about our personal enthusiasms. It’s about the love, and the best thing to do with love is to share it.

If you’ve never been to an FGC event, I encourage you to go. Even if you’re the lowest tier scrub – a “pot monster” – putting yourself in the crucible and facing off against serious players in the same room can be invigorating (if terrifying). You’ll probably get bodied! But you might squeak out a close round against somebody way better than you, and the satisfaction that’ll make you feel is indescribable. There’s a reason they call it the fighting game community – because for decades, long before the advent of online gaming, these players could only depend on each other to train and improve. Even though everybody’s gunning for that number 1 spot, they know that it’s meaningless without the other players in the bracket.

SonicFox coming out on his sport’s biggest stage is a true inspiration to all of us geeks out there. You can be whatever you want to be if you’re willing to put in the work, and the man is living proof. Geek culture is a big tent, and it’s just getting bigger every year.

Watch SonicFox take on GO1 in the grand finals below, and if you’re inspired pick up your stick and start training for next year’s EVO. Maybe I’ll see you there.